Botox at 8 years old

25 April 2011 — 7:21am

Getting a spray tan is a bit like getting a pap smear – you reeeally don't want to, but you tell yourself it will all be over soon enough and the chances of running into the person performing the procedure at your local supermarket are highly unlikely.

I also tend to take what I call the ‘ostrich approach’ – if I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m somewhere else, like a pitch-black room being eaten alive by spiders, or something else that would be much nicer than having a cold, smelly, brown mist sprayed over my naked, freezing body.

At 35, I have succumbed to enough so-called beauty procedures/myths to know waxing, shaving, preening, tinting, hair-dying, teeth-whitening and all the other forms of torture are just an extension of the superficial bullshit we tolerate, if not perpetuate, in the hopes of being ‘acceptable’.

And yes, I have succumbed to it and endured it and tolerated it because I’m old enough to have heard every marketing ploy and handed over my own cold hard cash and at some point or another in my life I may have even believed the superficial bullshit.

But I am 35 and I learnt the hard way.

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What then if we were to introduce our babies to these sanctioned forms of torture the deceitful pass off as the beauty industry and the insecure masquerade as necessary?

Such is the bizarre world of children’s beauty pageants, where our little girls are tanned and waxed and pedicured and manicured and teased and preened and painted until they become younger and younger real-life versions of a Barbie doll.

The end result of which is pure spectacle - little girls who resemble women. Little girls who are compared to other little girls and ranked according to their aesthetic appeal.

Shame on us as a society that our daughters are groomed into submission, objectification and sexualisation at such a tender age, in the name of entertainment. In fact, in the name of ‘building self-esteem’.

Obsessed parents, who are deluded by the promise of grandeur and notoriety and who condone the emotional and physical abuse of their little girls, do so under the guise they are encouraging confidence and promoting self-assurance.

Waxing at five and getting Botox at eight ... God help the next generation.

I have two daughters and we all love dressing up. My 10-year-old does a better job with the hair straightener than I do, but I have a limit.

The children have a limit.

No person in their right mind could possible enjoy the rigours of hours of hair and make-up, only to be critiqued and criticised and judged more or less inferior to another.

Parents who join forces with the pageantry circus enabling their daughters to resemble a side-show freak need to take stock of where their obsession might end – another generation of women more familiar with their inadequacies than their abilities.

Six-year-old girls don’t need a blonde wig and fake eyelashes to make them feel confident.

Building self-esteem this is not. It creates self-obsession. If there’s one thing we need less of in our world it’s the look-at-me, love-me, me-me-me philosophy.